Interview with Joshua Fried - The Complete Transcript

JOSHUA FRIED composes, performs, records, produces, and collaborates
in video, film, dance and performance art. Fried's recording "Jimmy
Because" (with guest guitarist Fred Frith) was released on Atlantic
Records, and he is credited as re-mix producer on dance records by
They Might Be Giants, Chaka Khan, and Ofra Haza.

"Travelogue," a piece Fried recently presented at the TWEED New Works
Festival in New York, is written for two synchronized audio tape
tracks and one live performer.  A Friedian back-up tape, heard only by
the audience, accompanies the vocalist, who in turn is asked to
imitate pre-recorded - and completely unfamiliar - voices played over
headphones, with every word, pitch and intonation intact, and with no
lag time whatever.  This last requirement makes the task quite
impossible, and the result produces a bizarre unknown language.
Needless to say, a person can perform "Travelogue" only once.

                            ******

up: Since most of the people who will be reading this prabably aren't
going to be particularly familiar with your work - your *own* work -

jf: What *is* your work?

up: What is your work; yes. Got it!  And, well, we were rehashing how
to even phrase this question; is it a *musical* experience, is it
performance art? What is the experience you're trying to create for
the audience members?

jf: Well, did you get the promotional thing from Donel Young?

up: Yes.

jf: Okay, so you know something about my background.

up: Yes, and we have the blurb from the "Travelogue" program, too.

jf: Right, right.  So, what kind of experience am I trying to create
for the audience and do I call it performance art?

up: Right - well, take "Travelogue": what is the experience there
you're trying to create? Is it visual, mainly audient?

jf: Well, it's a live event, and it certainly has theatrical elements
and musical elements. Until recently, I called everything that I did
"music", and I left it to other people to call it performance art, but
then I realized that there are grants that I can only get if I call
what I do "Performance Art", well then, god damnit, then "I am a
Performance Artist", do you know what I mean?

up: Yes, absolutely.

jf: So I finally admitted to myself that, yeah, it is sort of a
hybrid. "Travelogue," because it's a one time only thing, obviously is
only fully "Travelogue" when it's the live event. But I'm not about to
say to you "oh, I discount the visual," or, "oh, I discount...any of
it," you know?  I'm not that rigid. I would like to think of it as
more of a musical thing than most people get from it, simply because
they're so riveted by that performer, the music just washes over them.
But in fact I worked like hell on the back-up tape. A lot of people
don't respond to the accompaniment tape, or they only respond after
they've seen the piece more than once. I mean, the thing I've always
said is, since I'm *doing* it, I don't need to *label* it. Major
industries *have* to categorize.  And my work does sort of fall
between the cracks.  I mean, I guess it falls into the category of
performance art if you want it to, but my overall work, I see as a
composer, and I'm just using these performative elements because I
*want* to. I was actually participating in a concert that was, I
think, in 1991, and it was several different composers at this place
called Roulette in New York and all the composers involved happened to
be female, and it wasn't my music, I was in someone else's piece. And
all of them had these wild performance elements, and no one really
spoke about it until the review came out in the Village Voice, and the
guy was saying "This is it, this is the wave of the future!" And here
were women that were known as "experimental electronic composers", and
golly gee, they just happened to be using these highly performance
elements. One was doing these strange tribal calls, and another one
had this whole mime thing, and a text element, and a lot of sounds
from life, and I was in a piece where there was a lot of play-acting.
And I like the idea that as composers we can use these performance
elements; and, you know, it's hardly new. I mean, the Fluxus people
were creating pieces of music which involved, for instance, bringing a
bale of hay for the piano to eat.

up:  You're a performer, also?

jf: For years I performed with tape loops, and had this sort of
one-man, danceable, electronic, dub reggae act.  And I performed in
clubs all over the place, especially in New York, but in other cities
as well. I did double bills with the Giants, I opened for Ministry at
Irving Plaza, performed solo at places like Mudd Club and the
Limelight, and Danceteria and the Pyramid Club, and essentially - I
don't know if you're familiar with dub?

up:  Not sure.

jf: Well, dub is sort of the art of remixing reggae records.  And the
early dub records were in a way much more imaginative than reggae
remixes are now, or even dance floor remixes are now. It was really
sort of a subtractive kind of remixing where background and foreground
were reversed and a very artful sense of phrasing and mixing and
perception and space was employed. The idea is you have these
on-going, multiple tracks running, and, as a mixer, one juggles the
various elements in and out according to some pattern that is not
dictated by the structure of the song, but by some other thing. And
what I did is, I created my own grooves on these multi-channel tape
loops on an old reel-to-reel, and these tape loops would run, and I
would do processing and mixing of the tape loops live, in front of
people, sometimes with vocals, sometimes processing my voice, mixing
and processing and echoing and gating and dividing and multiplying the
sounds on the tape loops in a fashion that was pretty musical and
pretty danceable, and I was very dynamic up there, and moving and
totally getting into it, and this I performed in all kinds of clubs
for years. So most of my music has been performed by me. And what you
saw was, well, "Camden" was ten years old, but "Travelogue" is sort of
a newer wave.

up: You've brought up about half the other things I wanted to
ask you about.  Let's see - I have some specific questions about
Travelogue...

jf: Whate*va*...

up:  Where does the name for "Travelogue" come from?

jf: The piece was partially inspired by a trip to Europe and the whole
idea of disorientation. I sometimes put this in program notes: "The
title refers to feelings of dislocation, alienation, exhileration and
dispair experienced by travelers - and everyone else, for that matter,
at one time or another."
  I think the title works. It's also a low-key "cool" way of
describing something potentially very high-gear and hot, and I like
that.

up: Just to clarify, is it the same piece every time, is that why it
can only be performed once?

jf: Right. The piece doesn't change, so the performer has to change.
When I first made it, I thought, "oh, well, I'll have at least a
couple of different headphone tapes. That way I won't have to get a
new performer every time." But I ended up honing that headphone tape,
and, I may make some slight adjustements to it, but basically, there's
one, platonic ideal for the headphone tape for that piece, so there is
only one "Travelogue" and therefore it has to have a different
performer every time. People who have seen it before, some of the
TWEED people, ask me, "Is that the same tape?" and they can't believe
it, because the performers are so different. I mean, *I* believe it -
the piece is designed to accentuate each performer's idiosyncrasies,
while at the same time staying within a certain range emotionally, and
in terms of the amount of language versus gibberish that comes out. I
think that there are remarkable things about it, but the diversity is
not one of them.

up: So, where did this idea even come from?  And how do you compose
music to complement a not-entirely-reliable voice?

jf: Well, first of all, I make no claims that it's original - it's
not. My point is, let me do a great piece using this technique.
Similar things have been done - no one's quite done it this way. But
the idea of responding to headphones? That idea? Has been done by
various experimental people. There's one piece in particular by a
composer named Gavin Bryars, who's actually popular
again, now, but I didn't find this technique through the Gavin Bryars
piece, which was in the early 70's. I heard about it because there a
party game, that was played by Iris Rose and some other people
involved with her performance group, Watchface, where they would pass
around walkman headphones and listen to the Nancy Sinatra's Greatest
Hits album and watch each other sing along to songs that they didn't
know, you know, singing *right* along, and forcing themselves to sing,
sing, sing, so that it became this crazy gibberish, and the people who
were observing would just roll on the floor with laughter, and it was
uproarious. And when I heard about this party game, I said, "We have
to perform this."
  So we formed a group called Nancy. And Nancy was a threesome - we've
had some membership changes, which, actually, I think makes it cooler,
'cause it makes it more like a real group. And Nancy is much more of a
comedic thing than "Travelogue." In Nancy, we had the same members
from gig to gig, obviously, so we needed a constant flow of new
material. We'd make tapes for each other, and we'd get people to do
medleys for us. You might be familiar with the radio station WFMU?  We
had some FMU jocks make medley tapes for all of us.  You know Irwin,
"Your Old Pal Irwin"? He did this amazing medley tape for us that was
all Led Zepplin, because there was a Led Zepplin night at the Knitting
Factory, in New York. It was *pret*ty funny.
  Anyway, I, when I wanted to do sort of a longer, trumped-up piece
for my own career concerns, I wanted to go back to this Nancy
technique, but do a kind of serious piece, where I would carefully
tailor a tape, it would have a lot of spoken word, and I would do a
back-up tape to go with it. And, as far as the back-up tape is
concerned, I was very aware of the unpredictability, but I tried to
tailor the headphone tape *and* the back-up tape so that there was a
certain safety element, in a way.  For instance, during the finale,
there's a lot of repetition, but each repetition is transformed a
little bit, getting progressively slower. That way, if the performer
doesn't pick up what that poem is, and it's gibberish most of the
time, that's okay, because it's going to repeat until they *do* get
it. But if they get it very quickly, and we're worrying about
redundancy, well, that's not a problem either, because it's *changing*
each time. And, I know what this technique is about, and I have an
idea of the results I'm going to get, so I can gear towards that: a
certain amount of regular words are going to come out, a certain
amount of gibberish is going to come out. They're going to approximate
the emotional tone and the timbre and the pitch of what is going in to
a greater or lesser extent, and on the basis of that, I can proceed.
You have a good question, but because I'm so steeped in experimental
stuff, every composition has its own set of problems, and the fact
that there's this crazy gibberish element is just another thing to
work into it; it's not like I have to say, "oh my god, how do I
approach this?"

up: You must have gone through a lot of performers trying to get it
all worked out in the beginning.

jf: Well, I knew what kind of performer I needed, because I know what
it takes to do Nancy. And, bascially, out of the people that have done
"Travelogue," only two have not really cut it that well. And they
still did fine. Because I already knew what I wanted. So I did not use
guinea pigs as part of the compositional process. I basically went
with a tape, had one person come over before "Travelogue" was done
just to check it out, just to have *some*body put on the headphones to
give me some idea. And since then, the fine tuning has been after the
actual performances. But the very first performance of "Travelogue"
was good. It's evolved since then. It is kind of tricky, because it
may just so happen that three performers in a row have a certain
tendency, and I'll think, "oh, I really have to readjust the tape for
such and such a reason," but then the next performers that come along
and do it have a whole different way of doing it. So there is that. I
can get bogged down, myself, with that unpredictability.

up: Part of the point.

jf: Yeah - it's a challenge. But I think people would be surprised if
they understood just how exacting I am about the results that I want.
I mean, it sounds crazy, because so much of it is unpredictable, but I
have a very narrow notion of just how much gibberish is too much, and
how much is not enough. You know, I want 94% gibberish, but if it's
98% gibberish, that's not right. But the point is that the right
balance is there because it comes, very honestly, out of that
technique. More performers have tried out for the piece than have
actually done the piece. And I have my own private world of
"Travelogue" workshops, where it's one-on-one, and I have various
tapes that I work on with people, and it's a blast - that's a very
interesting experience, too.

up: You touched on working in New York, and all of the people you've
worked with. You move in the same circle as a lot of the people
involved with the Giants, as opening acts, Hello cd's, etc. But you're
also part of a more progressive performance community. How do you feel
about the various musical communities in New York right now and how
you fit into them?

jf: Well, there's a lot of different musical cliques. New York is
huge, there's a lot going on, and yet it's a small, interconnected
world. I've kind of danced between a lot of different niches in New
York. And everywhere. I'm a little bit like a fractal, no matter how
finely you sub-divide the different categories, I'm always going to
fall between the cracks. And I'm highly atypical of the Giant's
universe, because I'm dance oriented.  And a lot of the people who
have been associated with them have had no idea what to make of me.
I've basically come in at Flansburgh's behest.
  So, it's funny, you know, I really do fly between different things;
I mean, I'm known at the Knitting Factory, and the people that run the
Knitting Factory, that's a certain world. My music doesn't sound like
typical Knitting Factory music. There is *that* world, there is sort
of the club world where I was very entrenched in the 80's; I worked at
a place called the Pyramid Club, I had a lot of gigs. That world is
how I got hooked up with the Giants. The club world, and the sort of
performance art, lower east side world.

up: Do you agree that, you know, the Pyramid and those places have
fallen apart, that there's less innovative...

jf: Since the 80's? Oh, yeah. I mean, now what I tell people is, "you
may not believe this, but the Pyramid is still *open*." What a miracle
*that* is. But, yeah, it fell apart, kind of depressingly, and now
there's a surprising - not Renaissance - but some of it still
persists. Performance Art is now more at Dixon Place and P.S. 122.
Clubs now are clubs. But people used to go to the Pyramid Club because
they knew there would be an interesting show, period, no matter what
night of the week. Now you'd never go out unless you know specifically
what you're after. The specific act. So it *is* very different. I
worked at the Pyramid Club in its heyday, and it was *amazing*. John
Kelly, Ann Magnuson, Eric Bogosian, Ethyl Eichelberger, John - oh, I
said John Kelly. And you wouldn't know when they would be on. And
you'd go anyway. I also mixed sound at the Pyramid, so I mixed sound
for this young group that was changing their style called the Beastie
Boys, this young group that was up and coming called the Red Hot Chili
Peppers, a solo performance by this woman named Nico. I taped them. I
keep meaning to do some serious bootlegging, but I haven't gotten
around to it yet.
  It *has* changed a lot. It *isn't* what it was. And it's too bad.
But, on the other hand, the pieces, the work itself, is less clubby.
My work is less clubby. And there might be a lot of stuff happening
that I don't know about because I'm old. Places like Gargoyle
Mechanique, and the Gas Station - the Gas Station is probably closed.
I'm not sure where the places are, I'm sure it's not the same.
Because I basically, you know, with the people who graduated from the
"Pyramid School of Performance Art" are now at P.S. 122, or BAM, or
working a day job, or moved to Darien, CT, and I've gone where they've
gone; the one step to performance - I'm sort of in that world now. And
the Giants have gotten into an established rock and roll thing. And
they *don't* have the club scene that they had. Of course, they
couldn't, because they're so popular. I mean, it is too bad - I'm sure
you've heard about the good old days, and it's totally true. You could
go to a Giants show, and you know, it would be dominated by those hard
core people, now, that are on the Hello recording club. Like Dewan.
And now it's dominated by swarms of college kids, if you'll excuse me.
I've been to shows in New York where it was just mayhem. It makes
sense. I mean, it does, considering what their music is like.  It
kind of makes sense. That they have a lot of really smart, really
young fans.

up: You're clearly involved with the internet; but how do you feel
about it, does it excite you, or make you want to incorporate it into
your work?

jf: It totally excites me. And I'm one of the people that doesn't
just use it for practical reasons, but I get off on it for itself.
It's kind of a guy thing. I'm subscribed to Wired magazine, I'm into
that, although my music is still kind of low tech - you might have
noticed. Tech, but low tech.

up: Is that intentional?

jf: Well, not exactly; I basically got a state-of-the-art home studio
in 1979, and haven't changed it since. I never intended to become "The
Wizard of Analog." When I started composing, no one was saying "Oh!
It's *Analog*!" No, I started doing tape loops and "sampling" before
there were drum machines and samplers. For a long time, when samplers
came out, I would just look at them and I'd look at my tape loops and
think "What've they got that I ain't got?"
  I did switch over, a few years ago.  But I'm still roughly low tech
and none of the MIDI stuff was evident in "Travelogue." The only
technology you saw in "Travelogue" is technology that could be decades
old. I think it's curious that I have gone to electronic art
conferences and symposia, and people have really enjoyed my stuff, in
spite of its being low-tech and far from the state of the art. It
obviously is saying something about technology and yet, it's old
technology. I think the larger message is that technology is evolving
faster than people can really understand it. You know, people are
still trying to understand the McLuhan-esque implications of each new
medium as it comes out. There's this compulsion to jump on the new
techology, and that's fine, and yet we haven't really fully understood
the impact of the old.  We don't really fully understand the impact of
television.
  But, yeah, I am one of those people. What I was trying to do before,
was to draw a distinction between the people who say "Gee whiz, I
guess email is more practical," and the people like me who are
thrilled about it for its own sake. For instance, I have a friend
who's on the BBS Echo, and we did a little chat thing within Echo.
But then, I said, "Let me chat with you over the internet from my own
dial-up provider." And to her, it was, like *what*'s the difference?
Who cares? With me, it made an enormous difference, because it was
this thrill, because we were using *talk* instead of the local *chat*.
For me, that matters. You know, I have that thrill of doing a remote
login on some computer in Germany. And for other people, they just
couldn't care. So I have that sort of thrill, and I do think about it
in relationship to my art. So far, the only thing that I've come up
with that I do want to do, when I can, relates to using found
material. I now do performances where I take things off a radio live,
and I would like to expand that, and download things that are coming
across the various media channels, or actually, five years from now,
if I'm performing, and using found material, if the "info highway" is
something separate from what the Internet becomes, then I would use
that. Even though I'm intrigued by the decentralized nature of the
Internet, for my own pieces, I'm interested in this notion of taking
on-going commercial spew and truncating it and making it into pieces.
It's interesting, for me, to take a consumer radio, and tune it into a
station that anyone could tune into, because it's local to wherever
I'm doing my performance, and take little snippets and make a piece
out of it. At this point, I'd be more interested in doing that with,
like, cable feed and radio than I would with the Internet, because the
Internet is still something obscure.

up: The information we have says that you are "now working on a
multi-performer work that builds on the style of "Travelogue", and a
major collaboration with choreographer Douglas Dunn." What's that all
about?

jf: Future plans?  Well - I got an NEA grant!

up: I know.

jf: Oh, it's so unfair - everyone knows!

up: Congratulations!

jf: I always want to tell people, then they've already been told! So
that's to help me do this multi-performer thing. And I'm going to try
to have it mostly sketched out by the fall, and then do some things in
the fall, with the piece. And that will be as described. You know,
it'll have a tape, and possibly hired musicians, in addition to the
tape - some sort of brass and percussion thing, I guess. And then, the
Douglas Dunn thing - it's sort of similar, in a way. Dunn is a
well-known choreographer, who is sort of post-Merce Cunningham, and
was in the Cunningham company?  And we're going to do a piece where
it's people running around with headphones, but also dancers receiving
instructions in various ways.

up: When you finish remixing someone else's stuff, do you feel that
it's yours?

jf: My style is to do a lot of arranging from scratch. And, you know,
"Larger Than Life" is not a remix, it's a remake. That's what they
even called it. Because I used essentially *none* of the original
track, I sampled very few things off the original track, the original
tracks are not running; it's completely new rhythm tracks from scratch
with everything programmed by me, all the samples done by me. But it's
still their song. So it's sort of an arrangement - not only an
arrangement of their song, but a radical arrangement of their song.
It's not like Linnell doing the horn parts for a Flansburgh song.
It's a completely new arrangement, a new concept, building up from
scratch, for one of their songs. So it *is* very me, and yet it's not
a total Fried work.

up: If your style is rearranging from scratch, how much freedom do you
need to play with the original piece? Or do people choose you to work
with so that you *will* tear apart and recreate their work?

jf: The Johns hired me; I was not hired directly by the label, and
this was a mixed bag. People who hire me usually know what they are
getting or they wouldn't be using me. I've done more conventional
remixing as well, and feel fine about it. With the Giants I felt it
had to be the way it ended up - the original "Actual Size" is not
exactly a dance groove. Both Johns were quite taken aback by the
bitonality of the "Larger Than Life" bass line - listen to the bass
against Flans's vocals on the verses and it kind of sounds like the
wrong key (on purpose, of course). They begged me to pull back just a
bit, to "land" someplace and I did - on the choruses. It works better.
Working with Sensii and Miss Linda was a wonderful trip.

up: It seems like you collaborate on a lot of your work.

jf: Well, yes and no. "Travelogue" is all me. Most of my solo music is
all me. Actually, I have sort of a two sided demo tape that's been the
thing I've peddled around in the past couple of years and one whole
side is from a collaboration. You're right. I take it *all* back. Most
of the collaboration I've done, though, is not with other musicians,
but with performance artists, or text people.

                             ******

Joshua Fried has offered to sell copies of the out-of-print 12inch
vinyl maxi-single "Jimmy Because" (what few remain), and to dub a tape
of his more recent work for $20 apiece. Please email us
(kmpicker@midway.uchicago.edu) if you're interested.

"If that was my only cause, do you think I'd be having people jumping
up on stage and spouting gibberish?"
                                --Joshua Fried